We might consider sports to be gestural languages, each with rules of grammar, forms of poetry, and the like. But if that is the case then certainly the sporting technology or implement unique to each sport constitutes an important component of said language. With that in mind we continue our consideration of Massumi's logic of relation with an investigation of the ball proper.

If the goalposts, ground, and presence of human bodies on the field induce the play, the ball catalyzes it. The ball is the focus of every player and the object of every gesture. Superficially, when a player kicks the ball, the player is the subject of the movement, and the ball is the object. But if by subject we mean the point of unfolding of a tendential movement, then it is clear that the player is not the subject of the play. The ball is. The tendential movements in play are collective, they are team movements, and their point of application is the ball. The ball arrays the teams around itself. Where and how it bounces differentially potentializes and depotentializes the entire field, intensifying and deintensifying the exertions of the players and the movements of the team. The ball is the subject of the play. To be more precise, the subject of the play is the displacements of the ball and the continual modifications of the field of potential those displacements effect. The ball, as a thing, is the object-marker of the subject: its sign. Like the goal and the ground, the ball as a substantial term doubles the subject of the play, which itself is invisible and nonsubstantial, the catalysis-point of a force-field, a charge-point of potential (p.73, emphasis in original).

Put differently, the subject of the play is relation itself. This understanding of the nonsubstantial displacements of the object-marker and their continual modifications of the field of potential they effect is quite important, in my opinion, if we are to consider sport in this sense as a generative force. But is it consistent from one gestural language to the next? Though they are both open-ended, flowing sports contested on a rectangular field of play, the ball moves quite differently in a soccer match than it does in a basketball game. The primary difference may be located at the interface between player and technology, precisely in those ways gesture meets the object-marker that is the ball.

If we are to understand the subject of the play as relation itself, and we are further to grant the ball status as an autonomous actor in the field of potential, then it follows that we might inquire after the tactile quality of the relation between player and ball (and the possible subjectivities it may contribute to producing later in time). "From one singular to another, there is contiguity but not continuity," Jean-Luc Nancy suggests. "There is proximity, but only to the extent that extreme closeness emphasizes the distancing it opens up. All of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of touching is separation; moreover, it is the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other" (Being Singular Plural, p.5). Touching, heterogeneity: the erotics of otherness unfolding on the sporting field of potential.

It is not surprising, then, that great importance is given to the sense of touch between player and ball. When soccer players complain about the ball-as-object, they are usually upset about its weight or degree of firmness insofar as these variables concern flight — that is, they are concerned about the ball as a problem of ballistics. When basketball players complain, on the other hand, they are usually concerned with texture — the tactile quality one perceives as finger tips and pads contour the surface of the ball. In rare cases this surface texture may be too rough (as with a brand new ball), but is far more often too worn-in and smooth: ideally, a basketball should be broken-in just so, for the player with the ball wants to optimize grip, or the balance between a melding of surfaces and their friction.

Since the ball is nothing without the continuum of potential it doubles, since its effect is dependent on the physical presence of a multiplicity of other bodies and objects of various kinds; since the parameters of its actions are regulated by the application of rules, for all these reasons the catalytic object-sign may be called a part-subject. The part-subject catalyzes the play as a whole but is not itself a whole. It attracts and arrays the players, defining their effective role in the game and defining the overall state of the game, at any given moment, by the potential movement of the players with respect to it. The ball moves the players. The player is the object of the ball. True, the player kicks the ball. But the ball must be considered in some way an autonomous actor because the global game-effects its displacements produce can be produced by no other game element. When the ball moves, the whole game moves with it. Its displacement is more than a local movement: it is a global event (p.73, emphasis in original).

In soccer one finds that the ball spends most of its time in between the various players and goals on the field of competition — that is, in the process of becoming the various displacements which give Massumi's analysis its brilliant quality. With basketball, however, the story is different in a subtle but important way. Precisely because one is allowed to hold the ball or dribble with one's hands — in other words, to increase grip such that one has greater control over the displacements of the ball — we find with greater frequency a merging of the part-subject and part-object positions, or perhaps even their reversal.

One defending the player dribbling the basketball is indeed advised to completely ignore the ball and instead focus on the movement of the offensive player's trunk anatomy (ie. belly button). No matter what tricks and feints the dribbler may effect with the ball at the extremities of expressive potential (ie. head, shoulders, hands), it remains in orbit around the nucleus that is the core of the body. For a brief moment during the course of unfolding play, at least for this particular defender, the subject of play is no longer the ball but rather the individual who "possesses" the ball in a molecular (or micropolitical) relation. This is not to reject Massumi's thesis, but to qualify how the particular status of the ball as an autonomous actor varies slightly in the translation to basketball.

Turning to offense, it is also accepted basketball orthodoxy that it is far easier to score when the ball keeps moving between offensive players, particularly from side to side, as it forces the defense to continually shift in reaction. Breakdowns potentially open in the relational patterns the defensive team uses to guard its goal, resulting in opportunities to get an open shot, layup or dunk. Ultimately, however, it is the individual player who must put the ball in the basket. The subject position must be assumed. And when one scores often, the tactile relation between player and ball is overcoded to produce the subjectivity of the star, which infolds back into the field of potential to recondition further displacements.

At what moment does grip become grasp? When does the meshwork of relation flip to individuation and subjectivity? It appears to be when the movement-energy of the basketball-subject slows down to create a particular and temporary stasis in the play of emergence.

Comments

3 responses to On Massumi's Logic of Relation: Ball

[...] first satellite to relay a live transatlantic television feed? Did you know that Adidas created the official match balls of the 1970 FIFA World Cup, also named Telstar? Did you know that the black and white panels of the [...]

[...] In fact, more than any other sport, and because players are not allowed to use their hands, soccer's ball is the subject of play, and the soccer player its object. Put another way, soccer is the purest form of relational play: "When the ball moves, the [...]

I have enjoyed your website very much especially this post as I was thinking about the very same question lately perhaps with less sophistication. I have been thinking about a Deleuzean approach to theorize the game-play in soccer/football, found the website through a google search. In reading the Logic of Sense these days, I cannot not think about the way football is played on the field, ball as the "paradoxical element" in between two series;

The moment that the two series resonate and communicate, we pass from one distribution to another. (this is Deleuzean description of a game-play) The moment that the series are traversed by the paradoxical agent, singularities are displaced, redistributed, transformed into another, and change sets. (followed by a description of the movement of the ball as the object cause of the game-play)If the singularities are veritable events, they communicate in one and the same Event which endlessly redistributes them, while their transformations form a history. (history here is analagous to the match as limited 90 minutes) (Logic of Sense)

I think a similar point could be found in Difference and Repetition with regard to the discussion of the partial object through Lacan. Since I was curious about how these points could be elaborated, I should thank you for guiding me into Massumi's work in particular.

Another comment with regard to thinking between football and basketball: I think that one of the reasons why football resists statistical knowledge is about how posession is always in between. There are no set-plays that are "executed" in football contrary to basketball, there are only formations, which are distributions. The trick of football lies at those moments where no statistics is recorded, such as positioning the body (and series of bodies) with regard to the ball and the other players and their distribution on the field.

thanks for creating this site and allowing me to meet it

But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.

Margaret Atwood

sportsBabel

sportsBabel examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture, weaving between materiality, information, intuition and intellect. The notes posted here should be understood as emerging from an ongoing program of research-creation.

Threads of inquiry include: the security-entertainment complex and the militarization of sport; mediated sport as a spectrum of interactive possibility; the experiential qualities of postmodern sporting spaces; the cyborg body athletic manifest as mobile social subject; and the potential politics of a sporting multitude.

sportsBabel is produced by Sean Smith, an artist, writer and athlete living in Toronto, Canada. He holds a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland and has exhibited and performed internationally as part of the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in arts-based research inquiry with Barbara Fornssler. He was the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario in 2011-12, a participant at the Wood Land School – The Exiles residency in 2013, and one of the curators of Channel Surf, a 200km canoe journey and open platform for the arts that was one of 5 projects worldwide accepted to Project Anywhere in 2015.

He is currently adjunct faculty in wearable sculpture at OCAD University, a sessional lecturer on cartographies of the control society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and one of the founding members of the Murmur Land Studios curatorial collective -- an experimental field school initiative begun in 2017 that offers event-based pedagogy in art, philosophy, kinaesthetics, ecology and camping community for the post-anthropocene era.

Sean's poetic work has appeared in Brave New Word, One Imperative, a glimpse of, Inflexions, the sexxxpo pwoermds anthology and the Why Hasn't JB Already Disappeared tribute anthology to Jean Baudrillard. He has performed poetic-philosophy work at Babel, Tuning Speculation, the Blackwood Gallery's Running with Concepts conference, and the Art in the Public Sphere speakers series at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Visual Arts. His first full manuscript, Overclock O'Clock, was published by Void Front Press in 2017, while three other chapbooks, tununurbununulence vOo.rtex, Verbraidids, and Syncopation Studies have been released in the past year.

sportsBabel was the basis for the Global Village Basketball project (2009-2011), which was an unfunded 24-hour basketball event that attempted to network together various pickup games from around the world into one meta-game; at its peak, players from 9 different countries joined the game to collectively score over 2,000 baskets in a meta Red vs. Blue contest. His other sports-art work has been presented in such varied spaces as HomeShop in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, the Main Squared community arts festival in Toronto, SenseLab's Generating the Impossible research-creation event in Montreal, and in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art during Nuit Blanche.

His latest project, Aqua Rara, weaves a practice of embodied art-philosophistry together with athletics and kairotic time to work as a performance-text between myriad water ecologies, swimming gestures, and watching the Aquarium Channel endlessly on loop.

department of biological flow

The Department of Biological Flow is a project of research-creation by Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler exploring the concept of the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise.

The reference is from George Lucas' epic 1971 movie, THX 1138, in which a state-controlled intensification of communication processes manages every facet of daily life in a futuristic society, regulating the flux of all human subjects in work, leisure and love.

Though the Department exists in homage to Lucas’ vision, our consideration of biological flow seeks to reinvigorate the agency of the (in)human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.